How Jihadists Travel: The Clandestine Migration of Chinese Transnational Fighters to Syria

Abstract

This article explores the mobility infrastructure that enables and facilitates trans-national fighters traveling into conflict zones. The research on trans-national fighters focuses largely on the departure and arrival stages but rarely addresses how fighters arrange and execute their travel routes. The acts of border-crossing pose trans-national security threats while constituting the transformative processes in which individuals adapt to the identity of militant fighters. Drawing on studies of clandestine migration, this article uses primary multi-lingual materials collected through multi-sited ethnography in China and Syria to illustrate how Uyghur jihadists have traveled from Xinjiang to Southeast Asia and then to the Middle East. These circuitous routes were not made for the purpose of jihadists but assembled from existing commercial, religious, and illicit networks and infrastructures, intersecting with multiple layers of state and non-state actors.